shot followed immediately and jackknifed the street samurai like a tanker-trunk on ice.
Three steps into the open ground between the two boat houses and only the closest of the granges had seen me. As he turned and started to bring his Ingram up, everything above the bridge of his nose vanished and his body toppled back as if its bones had become water. As if I needed confirmation of what had happened, the report of Stealth's Kalashnikov echoed back from the ship.
Zig and Zag added their firepower to Stealth's effort by the time I'd closed half the distance to the girl. La Plante had already spun and dove toward the edge of the jetty. Bullets savaged the wooden decking all around him, but the silver-handed man lived a charmed life and avoided Stealth's retribution. A slug from someone's rifle blasted The Chauffeur to the ground, but he kept moving and scurried to cover. I couldn't smell blood because of the cordite filling the air, but I figured him to be smart enough to be swathed in kevlar the same as me.
A gillette stood up right in front of me. I could see from the way he moved and reacted that he'd not seen me at all and had been angling a shot at one of my compatriots. I shoved the MP-9's snout into his stomach. Because of the speed at which I was running, he folded around it like a knight skewered on a lance, so I kept my finger off the trigger and sprinted the last three steps to the woman.
Stealth screamed something at me, but I lost everything except his urgent tone amid the gun-battle's thunder. I saw flickering movement and light over by the ship, but I was so intent on the woman, it didn't register fully. Even the acrid, oily scent didn't trigger any emergency alarms in me.
Traveling at roughly Mach 2.086, the bullet smashed into me between the shoulder blades, just to the right of my spine. Even though the kevlar of my coat snared the bullet before it could penetrate my hide, and the trauma padding absorbed some of the projectile's energy, it still packed quite a punch. It lifted me off my feet like a leaf in a cyclone and tossed me forward. My left arm scooped the woman to my chest as the MP-9 went flying. A heartbeat later I twisted in the air so my back hit the boathouse and shielded her from the collision.
Suddenly a dragon's-tongue of fire flickered out through the space we had occupied before the bullet gave my feet wings. Without thinking I drew the Viper and pumped two rounds into the grunge wearing the flamethrower. The first bullet drilled an ugly hole into his right thigh, dropping him toward the ground. The second bullet took him high in the chest, and his dead body rolled to the foot of the gangplank.
Before the body had expended all of its momentum, La Plante's visitor appeared at the head of the gangplank and gestured toward the wharf area. In a flash of blinding gold-white fire, a monstrous figure appeared- a creature utterly out of proportion to the rest of us. With golden skin and eyes to match, the heavily muscled cat- thing laughed aloud in a hideous voice as a grunge whirled and emptied his Ingram into it. The bullets ricocheted off in a puff of gold dust, leaving faint freckles on the creature's chest.
In return for the decoration, the lion wearing a woman's head playfully swatted the grunge with its right paw. When the body hit the ground and stopped rolling, its chest sagged like a broken zeppelin. The torpedoes in La Plante's employ immediately threw their weapons down and lit out for the marina clubhouse and parts beyond. I would have joined them except that the conjured beastie stood between me and that possibility. Kid Stealth, firmly gripped in his own form of battle madness, leaped over the crates he'd been using for cover and attacked the lioness. His leap carried him five meters into the air and nine forward, with sickle-claws glittering like stars in the night sky. The Ceska Scorpion in his left hand sprayed gunfire over the left side of the human profile, then his claws hit. The metal-on-metal scream ripped its way through the night, then died as a feline roar of pain accompanied the gold curlicues Stealth tore out of the monster's left shoulder.
The creature dropped away from Stealth and rolled quickly onto its back. Stealth retracted his claws and jumped free to avoid being caught and crushed beneath it. In doing so, however, he hung motionless in the air just long enough for the cat's right paw to bat him out toward the bay. He arced over the yacht's prow and I heard a splash, but could not see anything to determine if he lived or died.
The creature pulled itself into a sitting position. Its tail swished back and forth, knocking the grunge with the flamethrower into the water. Despite wearing a woman's face, it licked at the wounds in its shoulder like a cat and briefly stemmed the flow of molten, golden rivulets running down its left foreleg. When I moved forward to put myself between it and the woman I'd rescued, its head came up and it hissed at me in a nasty fashion that had the Old One urging me to give myself over to his control.
The wizworm who'd conjured up the creature looked down at me from the ship. 'My sphinx seems to have cleared the battlefield of friends and foes alike, excepting yourself, of course.' He squinted at me, then a most evil smile possessed his lips. 'Is it possible you are the Wolfgang Kies mentioned as the person who took the elf, Moira Alianha, from La Plante?'
I nodded and stood slowly without dropping my pistol. I waved both Zig and Zag back with my left hand- I knew that with the sphinx between them and the magemaggot they couldn't get a shot off at him. I also knew that if the sphinx was powerful enough to kill Stealth, it would make catnip out of those two, so I didn't want them shooting it. I smiled as graciously as the Old One's nattering would allow. 'You have me at a disadvantage.'
The little man brought himself to attention and bowed his head. 'I am Hasan al-Thani. I have been sent to obtain the woman La Plante had for us. Though we preferred the elf, we will accept the flame-haired woman with emerald eyes.'
Something about Hasan irritated me, much like the wet sucking sound of a nasty chest wound. In mid- sentence his lips and words began to move out of synch and I got the feeling that I was hearing the words more in my mind than with my ears. I shook my head to clear it, but between his monologue and the Old One's continued war-chants, I found it impossible.
I stabbed my left hand into the air and shouted at both of them. 'Hold it! Are you telling me that you want me to just hand this woman over to you so you can cart her off somewhere?'
Hasan smiled woodenly. 'We do not see that you have any choice.' He gestured toward the sphinx. 'If you do not, we will kill you and take her anyway.'
I brought the Viper around and pointed it at the unconscious girl. 'So if I blow her away, you'll just leave?'
Hasan's eyes grew wide with shock, then narrowed to a more thoughtful size. 'We do not believe you would do that. We call your bluff.'
I dropped to one knee and triggered the remaining dozen bullets in the Viper. Spent shells rained over the wharf like cylindrical hailstones. Hasan ducked back by the sixth shot, but did not realize until later that he'd not been the target of my assault.
Stealth's shots, and those fired by the grunge, had only blown fragments of metal from the sphinx because they attacked the creature on only one level of its exis- tence. They hit the shell it wore when summoned to the material plane. While they could damage it or even cripple it, they couldn't kill the creature itself. Even the rents Stealth had carved into it with his claws had started to heal over.
My silver bullets, I was pretty sure, could affect the monster on the metaphysical plane. Silver has magical properties that make it perfect for killing all sorts of things like shapeshifters and vampires. It's been considered sacred and necessary for countless rituals down through the ages. As the Viper's slide snapped back for the final time, I just knew I had to be right.
I wasn't.
Sure, I'd done some damage. The sphinx had recoiled from my barrage and the silver bullets had indeed hurt it. I'd centered the shots on the face, and the dozen silver projectiles had savaged the creature's nose by blowing its tip off. The sphinx's reaction was sluggish and it appeared to lose its balance at one point, but it recovered before it could pitch over backward into the bay.
Hasan reappeared on the ship's bridge and glared at me. 'You leave us no choice. Kill him.'
As the sphinx got up on all four paws and stalked toward me, I realized where I must have gone wrong. Shapeshifters and vampires might have some natural aversion to silver-an allergy to it, if you like. But the sphinx was neither. It was a summoned spirit, which meant I needed something else to kill it. Being plumb out of sphinx leukemia virus, and suddenly regretting the loss of the flamethrower to the bay, I tried to remember if I had life insurance and if whoever I'd named as beneficiary really deserved the money.
'No matter,' I muttered to myself as I tossed the Viper aside and backed up slowly. 'The Mr. Johnsons at Kyoto-Prudential will figure my tackling this to be suicide.' To kill this thing would require attacks on both the material and metaphysical planes. I toyed with the idea of letting the Old One have his way with me, but I knew I'd end up like that grunge and Kid Stealth. It had to be something magical and physical, but with a creature this size, it also had to be big.
